1. Field of the Invention
This invention is directed to systems and methods for creating a modified image from an original image.
2. Related Art
Images are modified for a variety of reasons. One reason for modifying an image is to change how the image is displayed on a display device that is smaller than the display device the image was originally designed to be displayed on. Modifying an image to be displayed on a display device that is different than the display device the image was originally designed for is called retargeting.
As will be discussed in greater detail below, image retargeting techniques, such as display device retargeting, image zooming and the like, have conventionally focused on two techniques: 1) image resizing or image scaling, and 2) image cropping. However, these techniques are often unsatisfactory. Image resizing is often unsatisfactory because the resulting image often retains an insufficient amount of information and often contains aspect ratio changes that distort the retargeted image. The lack of sufficient information in the resized or scaled image is typically due to the reduced size, and thus reduced number of pixels, devoted to the various image elements appearing in the image foreground and background portions of the resized or scaled image.
In contrast, in image cropping, the cropped image retains a portion of the original image, while the rest of the original image content is discarded. Thus, like a resized or scaled image, the resulting cropped image also often retains insufficient information from the original image. Thus, like image resizing or scaling, image cropping is also often unsatisfactory. In contrast to image resizing, where the loss of information is spread evenly throughout the image, in image cropping, typically no or little information is lost in the portion of the image that is retained. However, the image elements, and thus the information content, of the discarded portions of the image are lost completely. This often means that the context of the remaining cropped image is lost.